I'm a journalist who's especially interested in the business and politics of wine. My writing and photographs have appeared in print, online, and on the radio for outlets including BBC America, Decanter, The Atlantic, DailyBeast, Worth magazine, Food52.com, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. I have worked for some of the world’s most celebrated chefs, including Thomas Keller, Alice Waters, and Jean-Pierre Vigato. I am also the founder of Harvard Alumni in Wine and Food. I travel the world in search of the generous spirit – and the pure joy! – of true hospitality.

Food And Wine Festivals: Ingredients To Loyalty And Success On Display In Atlanta

Chef Maziar Farivar, for example, spoke of how, after 35 years of cooking in the US, he finally felt brave enough to experiment with Persian dishes (from his homeland) at his Peacock Café restaurant in Washington DC. Chef Viktor Merényi from Hungary, when asked how he would present the cuisine of his homeland on a plate, suggested it doesn’t even fit onto a plate. He’d need to take the guest into the mountains, into a small town, to introduce them to kettle cooking as it’s done there. The meal would be soup, with Hungarian paprika.

Understanding how the food doesn’t fit onto a plate, either literally or metaphorically, ratchets up the level of entertainment and engagement by several notches. It also leads to another prominent theme of learning during the festival, that is, humble preparations and ingredients.

To hear Hopkins speak, as he did at the Slow Food Ark of Taste session on Saturday afternoon, you’d easily forget his celebrity status and arm-length list of accolades. Instead, you’d focus on that voice and what it expresses through the ingredients.

With more than 1600 items comprising the Ark of Taste, about 200 are from the US and those specifically from the South are what get Hopkins’ attention. (The Ark of Taste is defined as “a living catalogue of foods facing extinction.”) Those include Carolina Gold Rice, which was brought by African slaves; sorghum, which was planted in the 1860s to supplement sugar cane; and a ninth-generation American heirloom pea.

Guests to the session tasted preparations of each of those ingredients but, despite Hopkins’ status in the world of celebrity chefs, it was his humility that resonated, both in terms of his individual personality and his ingredients. The humility resonated because it made engaging with the ingredients a more realistic option for home cooks, who were not just motivated but inspired to do so.

The majority of food and wine festivals direct a percentage of their proceeds to charitable foundations, many of them locally oriented. The auction and gala at the Nantucket Wine Festival, for example, has long benefited the Nantucket Historical Association and its on-island points of impact.

The Atlanta festival’s charitable giving in its previous three-year history (2011-2013) amounts to 14 nonprofit beneficiaries, almost $300,000 in donated tickets, and $35,000 in cash gifts.

But it goes further than donations. Love and Fletcher also invited community chef-activists to participate in a panel discussion Saturday afternoon called Nourishing Community: Social Enterprise, where each chef described their experience leading philanthropic initiatives that benefit their immediate communities.

Chef Chris Hall of Atlanta, for example, described The Giving Kitchen project that started when one of his cooks was diagnosed with brain cancer and the team wanted to provide financial support for his medical bills. It’s blossomed into a philanthropy that donates cash to hospitality workers in need, including three grants worth $10,000 just in the past week.

Chef Ashley Christensen of Raleigh, North Carolina, well-respected as a leader of chef-driven philanthropic efforts, described the crowd-sourced requirement of creating exposure for underfunded causes. Applicants for a grant submit via a TwitterTwitter hashtag, #PeoplesCocktail; as the applicant generates retweets and favorites, awareness for the cause also increase, both online on social media platforms and within the restaurants and its workers themselves.

A similar momentum builds for the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival. When there are reasons to come to work beyond a paycheck, and when there are reasons to come to a festival beyond enjoying great food and wine, satisfaction increases.

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